philosophy

Category archives for philosophy

David Brooks has a new column grandly titled The End of Philosophy. Heather Mac Donald at Secular Right chides him for his criticism of the New Atheists, while John Derbyshire offers guarded praise. It seems to me that the jab at the New Atheists was something of a throwaway line and I lean more toward…

If the trolley problem is not known to you, I would recommend Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics. It is one of those works which combines brevity with density, a feast of ideas laid out before you which is nevertheless consumable in a minimal span of time. And Appiah is an engaging writer to boot,…

From page 33 of Brian Magee’s Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper: I came to realize, then that what matters above all else in politics is what happens, not what people say about it. And for the most part what happens is independent of my wishes. In…

…Das Kapital! So says Bora: Forget Dennett’s strawmen destruction – read Gould carefully for what GOULD is trying to say. The Big Book is ‘Das Kapitaal’ of the 21st century biology – someone now needs to write a shorter, simpler Manifesto for the masses to read and understand….and we can go from there. Go from…

A few months ago I saw a paper which showed that small average differences across societies on a microeconomc parameter can result in massive variance in macroeconomic trends. Small differences in average trustworthiness or patience across societies (or, more precisely, small differences in the distribution of the psychological trait) can map onto to enormous between…